Four Steps to Reduce Recruitment Costs in Healthcare

You know hiring isn’t cheap, especially during today’s talent shortages. And with inflation driving up costs, hiring needs can easily drain your budget. Thankfully, there are concrete steps you can take today to reduce recruitment costs and save money on hiring in the long-run. 

Common Recruitment Expenses

One way to assess your recruitment expenses is to calculate cost-per-hire. According to the Society of Human Resources Management, you can find cost-per-hire by dividing your total hiring costs (including internal and external expenses) by the total number of hires. 

Cost-Per-Hire

(Total internal hiring costs + Total external hiring costs) / Total number of resulting hires 

Internal recruiting costs include: 

• Recruiters’ salaries
• Costs of setting up an employee referral program
• Costs of training in-house candidates

External recruiting costs include: 

• Job board fees 
• Onboarding resources
• Background check and credentialing fees 
• Training costs

When you’re paying for each of these individually, it’s easy to go in the red. Here’s what you need to know to reduce recruitment costs. 

Four Steps to Reduce Recruitment Costs in Healthcare

1. Speed Up Your Hiring Process

The longer your positions are open, the more money you lose. When your positions stay open for too long, you risk falling short on mandatory staffing ratios in your state—something that could come with a hefty fine. 

If you have to continually recruit for the same positions due to turnover, you could rapidly accrue job board fees, advertisement costs, and other ongoing costs. 

Not to mention, patients will notice if you’re understaffed. If short-staffing hurts your reputation, you could risk long-term losses as patients leave your business. 

Quick Tips for Speedy Hiring

• Assess your process with a recruitment audit
• Make your jobs easy for candidates to find with effective job descriptions 
• Enable easy apply 
• Automate manual tasks
• Streamline candidate communication 

Learn More About Faster Recruiting 

2. Make Use of Employee Referrals

An employee referral program lets current employees recommend candidates from their personal networks for your open positions. 

Approximately 55% of companies say that employee referrals are less expensive than traditional hiring methods. Almost half (49%) say that these employees are likely to stay with the company longer. 

Since referred candidates tend to be more successful, an employee referral program can help you move straight to the interview and skip the job boards. 

Learn More About Employee Referrals

3. Focus on Retention 

According to Gallup, it can cost one to two times an employee’s yearly salary to replace them. We don’t need to tell you that turnover in healthcare is high, and these costs add up. When you focus solely on hiring and lose sight of retention, you risk going over budget without eliminating your staffing shortages. 

Quick Tips for Employee Retention 

• Create career paths
• Foster an inclusive environment
• Prioritize mental health 
• Communicate effectively 

Learn more about employee retention 

4. Use the Right Hiring Software

An effective hiring platform can take over normally error-heavy and time-consuming steps in the recruitment process. This can include scheduling interviews, gathering information, informing candidates of next steps.

Here’s one example: 75% of job seekers expect to receive confirmation of their submitted applications, and 39% expect that confirmation to arrive within 24 hours. 

If you’re able to automate emails through a hiring platform, instead of relying on a busy staff member, you’re better able to guarantee that candidates will get a timely response. Making a good impression this way can help you hold onto your ideal candidates. 

Automate Job Distribution

With automated job distribution, you can pay one flat fee to distribute your job posts to multiple sites, instead of paying to post on each individual job board. You’ll also save the time and resources it takes to sift through the posting guidelines of every job board. 

Learn more about automated job distributions 

Choose a Hiring Platform That Integrates With Other Tools

If you use different software to manage hiring, background checks, and license verification, your process could get expensive, fast. You’ll also lose time training staff on each individual platform. 

Instead, reduce recruitment costs by using a hiring platform that integrates with credentialing and background checks to create a seamless end-to-end process. 

Learn More About Credentialing 

Stop Reaching Out Manually 

Most HR teams spend a lot of time reaching out to candidates. These repetitive tasks can be handled with automated communications.

Automations can save your HR team’s time, help you communicate with more candidates, and free up your team to do more labor-intensive tasks. 

Remember, saving time is saving money. When your recruiters save time on administrative tasks, they’re able to dedicate their efforts towards streamlining your recruitment process and reducing cost-per-hire.

Learn More About Candidate Communication 

Check Qualifications With Prescreening Questions 

During hiring, your team probably spends a lot of time reviewing candidates who were never qualified to begin with. But you can streamline this process with automated pre-screening questions. 

When you automate prescreening questions (which can focus on basic qualifications, skills, experiences, and even values), you instantly weed out candidates who aren’t the right fit. Otherwise, you may waste resources pursuing candidates who you could have quickly eliminated. 

Pre-screening questions can also directly cut down on your job board costs. Some job boards that charge on a per-click basis waive the cost of applicants who don’t pass pre-screening questions. In other words, you can promote a job without risking paying extra for unqualified applicants.

Learn More About Using Indeed Sponsorships  

Learn More About Technology in Hiring

Better Hiring With Apploi 

There’s one effective option to quickly reduce recruitment costs without hurting the quality of your search. Invest in the right software.  

Interested in learning more about how you can recruit, hire, and onboard healthcare staff quickly? Contact us today for a free demo of our end-to-end talent management solution.